


I and You

by GretchenSinister



Series: My Top 20 Short Gen Fics [4]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Experimental, Gen, eldritch guardians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 02:26:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17820038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Can I just see a fic where jack joins with pitch because he is bored out of his mind and conquering the world sound like a good way to spend a saturday or something.And Jack just being the most annoying little hyperactive concentration deficient sprite he really is.Pitch trying to keep his calmhttp://24.media.tumblr.com/a753d77bd9eb91b1e78188f05395693c/tumblr_meukboSiB81r5ai9mo1_400.gifonly worse.+: I was going to tell you something but I forgot what. It was really important though.+and a half: How do you get your hair like that?++: The best way to get bunny off your trail is by making sure yo- OH LOOK A BIKE...[cut for length]"You know, this prompter and I came away from RotG with very different impressions of Jack’s fundamental personality.So I wrote a fic with Jack as a baby eldritch abomination. This doesn’t fit with the rest of my eldritch stuff, except in how Pitch and Jack talk to each other and exist.Pre-movie(ish). Jack is a strange spirit, so defined, with names and using pronouns to differentiate between entities. An old shadow can’t keep up with that, and comes up with the best solution it can.





	I and You

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr 4/9/2014.

_wind? wind cold wind very very cold_  
  
not wind  
  
all through mind body this wind  
  
cold and very cold chill hearts and  
  
ice  
  
ice that shelters in the shadows  
  
good and very good ice to freeze the spine and mind  
  
fill all the hollow language of fear to bursting real  
  
A form not form, blacker than the blackness between galaxies and vast as those tarry spaces, reaches out a curious thought towards the wind not wind that brushes up against its edges. As starless sky, as skull-dark, womb-dark, cave-dark, it has never felt the cold before. Cold is for bodies.  
  
But this is cold like it is dark, like another is light, but this cold is new so new and worth all the thought that can be brought to bear yes oh yes—  
  
_HELLO_  
  
The greeting bursts in the mind of all shadow, loud though not sound, sending sharp snowflake points coruscating over and into the infinity behind all unknown fears, and it condenses into itself, hastily throwing up armor though it is little skilled in this, armor being for solid things.  
  
_who are you? I’m keenhighcoldcrylaughandglitter—_  
  
The shadow loses the end of the name of this mind that brings the cold wind, foundering on the shore of  _I_  and  _you_ , how can this one throw such ideas around, how can this one be like it and use such wordlike things, how can it introduce itself like it has just one name?  
  
The dark sends back the sense of trepidation before opening a long-locked door, the electric tingle that rushes over the scalp when the wind doesn’t sound like wind at three o’clock in the morning, fingers clutching at dry grass when someone stares up at the unsullied night sky for the first time.  
  
_that’s not a name can I call you I can’t make those things back at you I’ll call you Pitch_  
  
Too much  _I_  and  _you_  again but a careful  _yes_  slides against the other’s icelike and all-too-definite edges.  
  
The shadow invites the cold and all the rest it is to come with it, to see what both can do, but before it has barely begun to explain the ice agrees, sending a drop of loneliness to the shadow that it shoves away. That is what too much  _I_  and  _you_  will do to ones like them.   
  
Throughout the world they move through like mist there are more wanderings into the snow and wanderings back out, miraculous rescues and strange strange deaths. One woman claims that ice has started to glow in the dark, one child has to be hospitalized when they laugh from sundown to sunup, one man finds a hoard of ice that only grows colder in the face of flames, whole towns find their lamps now shine dark, across vast swathes of land and sea the night and the day and the storm become so muddled the only answer can be that the world is ending.  
  
But the dark knows all too well it is not time for that yet, and certainly not time for that with ice and cold that laughs and uses so much  _I_  and  _you_.  
  
So though bodies are strange to go on like this would be far stranger, and the shadow deigns to move matter.  
  
The body is easy enough to convince the winter into, for all it is bizarre and exhausting in its thought and being it is just as curious as one should be. In a body the cold water takes the memory, and the shadow wonders if it should be so glad to see one fixed and frozen solid.  
  
The moon shines on the body and names it and it wakes. The shadow watches the body stay one body, one shape, it leaves the lake, the body, the winter. It leaves  _I_  and  _you_  and their dangers.  
  
In the quiet of ten thousand minds, the dark realizes it hasn’t managed to rid itself of the little bit of loneliness the other gave it.   
  
And yet, it is a little thing. Nearly harmless. Not worth the trouble of finding one body and risking pushing on the edges. It will keep as the shadow sleeps. A thing to return when the dark wakes.   
  
The minds it sleeps in begin to fear loneliness, and on this the shadow grows.


End file.
